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The new medium would spread half-truths, propaganda and lies. It would encourage
self-absorption and solipsism, thereby fragmenting communities. It would allow any
amateur to become an author and degrade public discourse.
Sound familiar? Such were the anxieties that the invention of printing unleashed on
the world as 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century authorities worried and argued about how
print would transform politics, culture and literature. e ‘printing revolution’ was by
no means universally welcomed as the democratiser of knowledge or initiator of
modern thought.
In 1620, Francis Bacon named printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass as the
three modern inventions that ‘have changed the appearance and state of the whole
world’. For others, this outsized influence was exactly the problem. A few decades
earlier, the scholar William Webbe complained about the ‘infinite fardles of printed
pamphlets; wherewith thys Countrey is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study
furnished.’ Around the same time, the pseudonymous Martine Mar-Sixtus lamented:
‘We live in a printing age,’ which was no good thing, for ‘every rednosed rimester is an
author, every drunken mans dreame is a booke’. Printing was for hacks, partisans and
doggerel poets.
Addison himself was not so sure about the positive effects of print. In 1714, he wrote
in e Spectator:
e Tatler included a character, the ‘political upholsterer’, who was so obsessed with
reading the news that he neglected his shop, leading to bankruptcy and insanity.
The frontispiece to a 1750 reprint of The Spectator, depicting seven honest readers discussing issues of the
day. Courtesy Special Collections, the University of Otago, New Zealand
e first issue of e Spectator closed with an address ‘for those who have a mind to
correspond with me’, at the printer ‘Mr Buckley’s, in Little Britain’. e public
answered the call. e periodical, like its predecessor e Tatler, reproduced
hundreds of readers’ letters, using them to represent alternative viewpoints, provide
comic relief or just fill space. Collections of handwritten letters that readers sent to
Steele and Addison remain at the British Library. e publication of letters fulfilled
the claims of the magazine to represent a diversity of opinion.
Printed news also started out as, essentially, collections of letters to the editor.
Newspapers did not routinely employ full-time reporters until the 19th century. At
that point, the older meaning of ‘journalist’ – someone who keeps a journal –
disappeared, and the word began to refer solely to news-gatherers. Similarly,
interviews and in-person reporting did not become common until the 19th century.
e earliest papers, in the 17th century, simply cut-and-pasted from letters that
printers had received from correspondents around England and continental Europe.
Some printers obtained letters by bribing officials with access to diplomatic
correspondence. e first ‘foreign correspondents’ were diplomats who supplied
intelligence offices and newspapers at the same time. In 1733, one magazine editor
wrote that the meaning of the word ‘news’ was the collection of information out of
letters that had arrived through the ‘Posts Foreign or Domestick’. When the wind blew
toward the west, holding back ships travelling from the continent, there was no news.
erefore, the earliest forms for public discussion of politics and literature in print
presented themselves as epistolary conversations. Rather than negating the
personalising effects of handwritten correspondence, they relied on them to make
new forms of print seem familiar and understandable. e ‘print public sphere’ made
its debut as a series of letters.
I ntellectuals had been using letters as spaces for quasi-public engagement for
decades prior to the emergence of newspapers and periodicals. In what some have
called <https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300053593/impolite-learning> the
‘Republic of Letters’, scholars exchanged their literary and philosophical work and
critiqued others’ productions. Similarly, the natural historians of the Royal Society
debated experiments via letter, and sent out questionnaires with sailors travelling
around the world. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, these epistolary
exchanges migrated into print. e Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions – the
world’s oldest scientific journal – and the first journals for book reviews both
established themselves in part by re-publication of letters. e printed versions
continued to use the letter format to signal their epistolary origins.
At the time, the reliance of the print public sphere on personal handwritten letters
would not have seemed paradoxical. Early modern and 18th-century correspondents
had a fundamentally different understanding of the letter genre than the one that
prevails today. While we tend to see the space of the envelope as almost sacrosanct –
making it a federal crime to open mail addressed to another – letters in the 17th and
18th centuries enjoyed no necessary connection to privacy. For one thing, ready-made
envelopes did not come along until the 1840s. But even letters carefully sealed with
string and wax were sometimes less than private.
e fact that writers knew letters were part-public and part-private shaped how they
were written. Sometimes writers exploited the tension inherent in this aspect of their
character. A popular work of epistolary proto-fiction, Charles Gildon’s e Post-Boy
Rob’d of His Mail: Or, the Pacquet Broke Open (1692), for example, purported to be a
collection of 500 letters stolen by a club of gentlemen engaged in a ‘frolick’. e
letters included those from a gentleman to his mistress, an aspiring poet to the editor
of the Gentleman’s Journal, a ‘Country Fellow giving an account of London to his
Cousin in the Country’, and an apprentice to his mother complaining about
mistreatment by his master. e collection showed the range of different and subtle
ways that letters worked, from the sensational to the scholarly.
In the 18th century, most newspapers enjoyed support from political parties. In the
1720s, the British prime minister Robert Walpole subsidised several different
newspapers, although he was not successful in controlling the news. Because
Parliament banned the reporting of speeches and note-taking in the galleries until the
late-18th century, papers often relied on individual politicians for political news.
Although papers came to support themselves through advertising and sales rather
than government subsidy from the late-18th century on, it remained common into the
early 20th century for newspapers in the UK and the US to be affiliated with
particular political stances – a model that seems to be experiencing a resurgence
today with cable and digital news.
During the ‘golden age’ of newspapers, from the 1940s to ’80s, mainstream media
recognised and pursued an ideal of objectivity. It held that reporters should not
advocate from a particular political stance but should follow a procedure that would
present the most verifiably factual information available. Such an ideal and method
was foreign to the writers of the 18th century; ‘objectivity’ took more than 300 years
to develop in its modern form. However, earlier journalists used letters in a way that
signalled an awareness of the problems with partisan reporting. Incorporating letters
into newspapers and periodicals demonstrated that readers were getting a variety of
perspectives – they were seeing the sources and could judge for themselves. is
method was a different way of recognising the same problem, distrust of biased
information, that the later professional standard of objectivity tried to solve.
Epistolary norms called for the writer not to impose their opinion upon the
correspondent. Letters should present ‘news’ while allowing the recipient to form
their own judgment. e common phrase that pieces of news were sent ‘for your
information’ suggested that the writer would refrain from pushing a particular
interpretation – whether or not they actually did so.
By addressing the reader through the second-person salutation (‘Dear You’), printed
letters of news implied that anyone picking up the paper was a potential
correspondent. And because letters also imply the expectation of response, this
meant that any reader could also be a source of news – which often materialised
when people wrote letters to the editor. e cyclical relationship of the epistolary
network provided the logic for exchanges of printed news. Newspapers and
pamphlets positioned their correspondents as sources of verification, rather than
asking readers to trust the opinion of a single author, editor or printer.
I n the present-day shift to digital media and upheaval in the news industry, some
idealise the printed newspaper and its ability to foster a unified understanding of
the facts. Part of what has been lost, these commentators presume, is the ‘imagined
community’ of newspaper readers. is sphere, as Benedict Anderson outlined
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/2259-imagined-communities> in his classic
study of nationalism in 1991, is one in which each individual reader is aware of the
thousands of unseen others reading the same words in the same form at the same
time (given the extreme ephemerality of any individual newspaper, which becomes
outdated after 24 hours). In this way, the print public sphere allowed for citizens to
debate topics of public interest but also implied arrival at a consensus, which would
then be presented in the next day’s newspaper.
But the impact of print on public opinion was not only to establish a common
understanding of the facts. It took hundreds of years for news reporters to develop
the concept of objectivity, which did not necessarily mean that one was personally
neutral but rather that one had followed a professional procedure to obtain unbiased
information. And objectivity met with immediate objections from journalists who
thought that an effort to present ‘both sides’ of every story might distort rather than
reveal the truth. In recent years, political operatives have exploited this weakness in
the concept of objectivity to present issues such as climate change and measles
vaccination as having ‘two sides’, both of which must be represented in the media. For
example <https://archives.cjr.org/essay/the_danger_of_fair_and_balance.php> , by
treating climate change as a partisan issue rather than as scientific fact, ‘objective’
newspaper coverage has contributed to the perception that there is still legitimate
scientific debate over humans’ impact on the environment. e result is not
consensus but confusion for readers, compounded by, but not a direct consequence
of, the decline of printed newspapers.
e public sphere was always perhaps more ideal than reality. Letters helped
everyday readers understand how they could or should interact with print. But of
course most people do not write letters to the editor; they consume other people’s
opinions. And the personal, irrational or fake could never be banished from a world in
which humans want to exchange gossip and scandal as much as – or perhaps more
than – rational, enlightened debate. Understanding the complications of the public
sphere 300 years ago illuminates how new media are again changing ideas about
truth, fact and the news.